Poetry, as well as living generally, is a kind of terra-forming, word creation and world creation, even when it is in the form of archiving, even flarf. They are acts of pushing neuroplasticity or letting it harden. As Steve Jobs said in his poke the world said, “everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build things that other people can use […] however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways.”
I’ve been looking at poetic form and the lives that form the form. Is there an index of prevalent form of poet and outline of cause of death? Do sestina fans have better or worse mortality rates than balladeers or free versers. What about outcomes in life pattern? Does the person end up drunk and having alienated everyone around them? Do they end up in a medicated tailspin that never rallies? Do they live quiet “successful” lives of depression behind false masks of cheer? Or are they living lives I’d want to emulate of openness, good will, being a friend to self, reconciling problems, engaged and energetic, matured among all the usual struggles life throws?
I look for people who allow themselves to vary rather than caricature themselves into one small corner of perception, reflection and expression. One must be able to move. If I demand the same old, I aid the person in crushing their own spirit into a too small of box. Some will want the privacy afforded by the one-channel public persona, but I’m not sure I get it.
I’m trying to get the general picture, which makes for a lot of data. I speak in vague generalities by times, impressionistically. As one of my favorite sayings go, I’m going to speak loosely and you need to listen loosely.
In listening to two readers some weeks ago one spoke in monotone. I couldn’t hear. The inflection curve was deadpan you might say. The other erred on the other side being constantly theatrical with inflections all over the place and gave the impression of patronizing children in that odd cadence people get around kittens except it went on regardless of tone of subject of poem for what seemed like hours but was probably 15or 20 minutes. To vary is natural. (Poetry’s skin is leather goods with natural variations?)
I try to keep all the 5 tastes on the plate at once, switch among them. Part of this is fear-driven because I think I can’t afford the luxury of dwelling in any direction or I won’t be able to get back. Having a monolithic experience is to be in the vulnerability of illusion. Or is a manifestation of my not feeling secure enough to accept being where ever I am, always needing one foot somewhere else? Some regions of the universe are uneven, spotty, with only one prevailing feeling. By randomness there will be clustering. By denying the clusters and needing to break them up I am not accepting what is. I don’t allow that; it takes trust in the world to do something entirely, feel something completely, say something in full. I am at least 10% skeptical of all things, never fully believing. That holds me back.
What I write and how I live inform each other. I consciously use poetry as a drug to counter myself. When I am chaotic, I go to haiku. If I’m feeling mentally blocked, I open up again with non-linear visual or absurd poetry. If I’m running short on beauty, I seek out grace. If life is dully smooth, I can add a little dark humour to sense.
I’m trying to learn the art of minimalism morsels, but at the same time allowing range of large canvas of complexity and non-linear. I check and balance myself. Perhaps check in the hockey sense and balance in the teeter on skate sense.
It’s a regular frustration to me that things I knock off the cuff when most depressions gets the best feedback. The confused rambles dazzle. People says they like how it feels. A buzz of emotion comes thru I suppose. That which I find valuable I have worked on longest, and probably overcooked. The value was the process, the working the language tools and being worked by them and the thinking thru. Which doesn’t make good poetry or guarantee bad poetry. Both it and the oblique blurts have their uses. Perhaps they balance each other out.
Reading people who killed themselves or lived destructive lives suggests that this is no one I’d want to emulate or attend to in life form or poetic form. Can the form backform the person? If one trains oneself to order, does neuroplasticity adapt? Writing is said to be generative and transformative. Since high school I was coached to let loose, do free form poetry, be liberated. Poetry workshops sometimes go in the head-dump, confession is cure model for personal growth. What if personal growth can also be achieved thru order? What if the person must grow regardless of conditions and if an environment of anything goes, anything is poetry or in an environment where there is a conscious effort to be accountable for making a better world and better life choices by carefully examining and attending to details of language to form a better person thru attention, meditation?
You can write about something or you can write how. I’m more interested in the underlying premise of the poem than the main content, more interested in the how than the what. The whats are a small set of universals. The how combos are the infinite diversity.
Your attitudes extrude out of anything. Walk down the street. What you attend to are shadows moving in grace or tumbleweeds of chip bags. Same street. Whether you write with conventional syntax or not, use words or part letterforms, prose blocks or scatter of letters, use all poetic device or eschew as many as possible, write from your life experience or curate randomalia of text around you, your bias isn’t shakeable.
Some people seem to think that only telling the true story of how they perceived it really happened in one split second of judgement, contained in lyrical form is the only way to truth of self-expression. And value self-expression as a high value. What if the value is for community, collective? What stories of others is worth paying attention to and bringing forward with our species?
It is all about containment and transcription of the right details. As opposed to the wrong details. It’s a binary state where a poem can be made right with effort in only one correct way. It might be due to the parable of the sculpture who finds the form predestined and hidden within any chunk of stone’s grain and crystal. There is an overlap between that clench of mind and those who fear of sharing ideas because other people will steal them and profit from their rightful copyright. And those who take as cardinal rule: no appropriation of voices.
That presumes there is a one voice. It is a notion of essentialism as well. Again that ticky tacky box for identity.
Joseph Harker reflected, “I feel like I’ve plateau’d in a lot of ways poetically: I think I need to both challenge myself more, and be more community-oriented (because you can only develop yourself so far in a relative vacuum).”
Part of that movement to social elements of poetry is seeing that poetry is not some isolated thing out there. Art as sealed, done by Great People. It is a model that assumes people ascend to a skill. Of course as people diligently try and fail and try, learning usually happens and skills improve but.
Even if the aim of poetry is not a practical propaganda, or an intentional expression of one meaning to a particular audience, it is a process and product and process inside a not so closed loop of information. It is a reaction against or movement towards and around what we’ve perceived in direct experience, expectations, models, etc.
Prompts that say write to emulate a form can chip one’s clasp off of writing about something and instead looking at what embedded assumptions are expressed or denied how.
I tussle with the idea of balance of mind, heart and verbal muscle in a poem. Sometimes they don’t have to balance. There doesn’t have to be a sense intended. Maybe the unconscious is driving towards somewhere. Sometimes it is just tooling around. That doesn’t mean it should not get in for the ride, or that it is a waste for the driver or anyone else.
There seems a moral spin put on poetry to demand that is is either autobiographical or suppression/denial. It’s alternately frustrating and comical. Everyone want to be the hero who rescues which is based in a belief that the other is a lesser who needs help. Not enough damsels in distress in this world. Perhaps we can manufacture some if we ever get to the level of cloning. Now, there is something with a genuine set of moral implications.

Some nice words in the round up about the Air chapbook here. Some more great poems at Experiment-o.

It seems to be a consistant problem: If I don’t blog about something while it happens, I’m too tired afterwards and life presses on, adding to the tottering pile.
I read at Art Bar with rob mclennan and Shannon Maguire recently.

Shannon Maguire’s poems in her new chapbook Vowel Wolves & Other Knots is the first set from a longer manuscript which are translations and transposing to current old German poems of wolves and tweaking around the syntax.

rob was reading from a (short) history of l. and new prose poem pieces. Hub and I thought there were among the tightest and most musical. Something shifting in the work which is always interesting to see.
I rarely appear in photos here because I’m always on the other end of the camera or the only one documenting so when I read, I don’t exist outside that time and space. In this case number one in fan club was at the reading too so he photographed me.

Reading from Thirsts. Copies are now at Collected Works along with 3 other titles by me. One even sold this week. Woo.

Reading from the new chapbook I edited and designed. People are saying very nice things about how it all works together. The second print run is about 1/3 sold already. By time we do the official launch reading, it may be to third printing. Odd but interesting.

There was an open mic of 10 people. I took no notes under my new practice of attempting to retain rather than transcribe. It was nice to see some slam slipped in there with Emily’s poem on accepting body and gender and self as is, by how she sees fit. Emily rocked. ‘I want to have the brain of Hilary Clinton and the body of Beyonce.’ There are more photos in the stream to either side of here.
It was a good night. Good vibe in the room. Good turnout. Open mic was well-controlled for time and number of people and not bad. Some good pieces. And I made $160 between book sales and honorarium. (The Ottawa Small Press Fair by comparison yielded over $200 in sales.) So even by train, material costs of getting there was covered, even if cost of time is slim. It’s partly a matter of pleasure of being among like-minds, meeting people in person.
I’ve been thinking about slam versus poetry where the performance is more often designed for one-on-one, reader to page. Conversations around it bring up the distinctions of intent from the point of conception of the poem. Is a poem I make to communicate? If it is not meant to communicate, why would it be published? Is a matter of access? Is it a matter of demand? Slam poets charge admission to attend the performance and are rewarded in some series by a literal payoff after a runoff for most resonating performance and winning the night with cash in the pocket. For book poetry the admission charge is buying the book but seeing it read is often free, or free-will offering. How does it all jive? I feel like I’m missing considering a piece.
We’ll see how Toronto goes again. Dec 10th and 11th we’re back there at the AvantGarden Series where I read with Christine McNair. It’s a longer set. Instead of 20 minutes of reading each, this one is up to 40 minutes each.
With a name like AvantGarden, how can it not be cool? And we’re at the Toronto Press event the day before. See details of when and where here.

I wouldn’t say I’m drowning in poetry. Or if I am, I am content with it and bring on the rain but I am far behind in reading most of it.
I took an evening and read half of the top of pile:
The currrent issue of Magma Poetry. As Rob Mackenzie remarked, there’s a stellar article in there by Maitreyabandhu on writing poetry. I’d want to quote it extensively. And re-read. One of the things I love about this magazine is their columns on poetics. Like La Scena Musicale, there’s a column that goes deeper than surface in every issue.
What else have I got on the go? The treasure trove of books and ideas from the fall Ottawa small press fair:
Above the Hum of Yellow Jackets by Carol A. Stephen (Bondi Studios, 2011). This is the first single chapbook by Stephens and I have to admit I’m biased from a few directions. One, because she has a sense of wordplay and humour paired with dark vision, which are uncommon among people I read. Her poem envisioning death on the highway walks that line without being maudlin nor fluffy. And two, one of her poems in there I published last year in Chromatic Beliefs. Three, she uses language like “Our hair blows in the faffering wind”
[10] by Amanda Earl (SPAO Call and Response poetry postcard)
I got to the exhibit just in the nick of time before it closed. She’s extending that use of pause and punctuation using a different method to the same end as Peter Riley. He used paragraph form and slashes to compress and separate simultaneously. Here, Earl controls pauses and presses onwards simultaneously. The enjambments are there and off-kiltering the pace yet run smoothly at an angle. It’s a kind of tension like pushing the brake and gas pedal at once.

here. a tree. the ghost. of a
tree. we hurry. towards &
away. old souls. keep

Already Monty Reid’s poems: So Is the Madness of Humans of the next cycle are up at the gallery.
Royal Jelly, Back to my old Self and Mutt, a package of 3 poems from Odourless Press.
All sealed inaccessibly as grab lot. Normally I’d pass on those in principle, like those magazines that come in newsstands in a shrink wrap, but for $1, why not. Still, haven’t opened them. Although the one packaged with a package of matches will have to have something done with it before all the jostling about of boxing books lest the very off possibility of igniting something. Ideas are only tinder to a match.
Arc Poetry Annual: Poet vs. Poet
It has 15th Annual poem of the year. It’s always interesting to see the poem picks of different editors and interpolate how troublesome consensus must have been in processing the submissions into keep and slush pile. The issue also profiles contest listing and questioning the idea of the poetry competition. (In any of the promo of the issue, that didn’t come thru. I took it as a rehash of the tiresome caged match concept.)
Once I get settled at a new address I can subscribe. A square magazine in a long envelop and Canada Post do not mix well. It came with envelope torn open and looking like a lucky ‘Nam vet.

Sri Chinmoy books I meant to cycle back to but missed. There’s a post-humous book with a foreword by Desmond Tutu called The Jewels of Happiness. I picked up a card with the quote from Sri Chinmoy “The power that dominates/Cannot solve world problems./The power that loves/Can solve world problems.”
Bark by Czandra, R. de Smit and erika n. white, (Broken Rules Press, 2010). The cover is a reproduction of birchbark that is printed full-bleed and iridescent on nice paperstock. Haven’t read it all yet but there’s this by R. de Smit in Pastichio.

there is a line between
parody and homage
which I think I have lost
perhaps only misplaced
its so hard to keep track
of where everything goes

This side uP by Czandra (sitting duck & Broken Rules Press, 2011) Handstitched in a batch of 120 and launches Tuesday, November 22 · 7:30pm at Cafe TWIGS, Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec.
I haven’t read it all but I have to say I love “10,000 Buddhas” for Louise Carson, a poem about a commissioned Buddha statue that took 10 years to make because

The 10,000th one eclipsed
all the rest, and is seated now
in the temple.
My friend has been carving
nine thousand nine hundred ninety seven,
gifts of gifts.
You and me, we sand burrs, extrusions”

Looking Into It by Ken Norris (above/ground, 2011)
This was disappointing. The last chapbook I read from him was sharp and lucid. These are poems about trying to write, diaristic and glum. I suppose if a poem is a part of a conversation, there will be dips, silences and moods will vary, otherwise one is holding oneself to being a caricature of performance.
If Leaf, Then Arpeggio by Camille Martin (above/ground, 2011)
Haven’t cracked it yet. Heard much of it at the AB Series tho.

Two tables at the small press fair.
Li’l Bastard by David McGimpsey (Coach House, 2011)
Heard excerpt from it for a couple years at various readings. Thought I already owned it. Seems I didn’t. There’s a smoothness to anecdote, off-handed grace that I want to reread more carefully.
Notes from a Cartywheel by Christine McNair (AngelHouse Press, 2011)
This materially absorbs me. Lovely design, paper stock, interspersion of scanned images thru the pages. I’ve only yet flipped thru but it is McNair’s usual compression of non-linear “non-meaning” into sound that caused the Versefest mixed audience this spring to go back on their heels and feel it, whether they were haiku poets, slam poets, traditional form verse or free verse or tag-along spouses of writers.

Buschek Books was there. And I scored the coup of the first two of the series by Pato. I’d read out of order but now have m-Tala by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Moure (Buschek/Shearsman, 2009) and Charenton by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Moure (Buschek/Shearsman, 2004). Look forward to having a long sit to go thru these.
Didn’t know that was going to be there but the surprises are part of the appeal of the small press fair. There’s a variety of things and usually time to chat if you’re visitor or vendor. As a vendor I was very happy with sales. $20 for a full table and I made that back more than tenfold.

These ladies had a booth with a book called Sex and Samosas but I didn’t get there in time to see but they’ll also be at theOIW Authors and Artisans Fair, Jack Purcell Centre November 20th-21st 2011.

Ethan Rilly: An illustrator and the cartoonist behind Pope Hats. His first comic was the winner of a 2008 Xeric Foundation Grant and the 2010 Gene Day Award. His second book was published by AdHouse Books. Rilly currently lives in Montreal but was at the Ottawa Small Press Fair, Ottawa, Nov 5, 2011
In the mail I recently got:
Haiku Canada Review, Vol 5, Number 2 with a couple inserts of haiku sheets. Also good for a long sit.
What an Elephant Looks Like by Edward Nudelman (Lummox Press, 2011) arrived. Promising to be quirky and surreal and super blurbed and promoed, I’m curious to see where Nudelman went to after poetically we last workshopped together 5(? 6?) years ago.
Geist, Issue 82, Fall 2011.
It looks at the Vancouver Literary Scene in the 70s. A sort of CanLit primer of an issue.
Keeping the Quiet by Rick Kempa (Billowing Ark Press, 2008).
This one is long awaited. I have the luck of having met his poetry and a piece is in Air Out/In Air. His is a poetry that isn’t sound byte hyperactive but builds bit by bit. His poems have a hallmark of compassion to them. The world he builds is a kind one. “Wish for Him” p. 53 is about a woman with erratic behavior, perhaps senior ill, perhaps senile. We don’t know but it is about the negotiation of being the sandwiched generation. Likewise “At Spirit Lake”, p. 65, has the sense of making sense into life, realizing ones future actions are a nod to one’s past inactions. Strikingly worthwhile reading.
Online:
Rules for Poetry by Rick Lupert is a new e-chapbook he put together in May and I’ve just come across it.

Caterpillar Poem
Addie discovers another caterpillar walking up her arm.
We’re not sure if they’re coming from the farmer’s market produce
or if they’ve set up a civilization in our house.
Three caterpillars this week alone
each one found walking up some part of Addie.
I can’t blame them really. If I were a caterpillar
or any living creature That’s exactly what I’d be doing

“Caterpillar Poem” is just so filled with tenderness of love and yet not sappy somehow, not overdone. It catches me by surprise especially since some of his poems are blunt conversational, or unapologetically goofy, like “For Robert Wynne” in there or his How to Kiss.

At the same time, different part of town is Capital Slam. Saturday, November 19 · 6:30pm – 10:00pm at The Mercury Lounge in the Byward Market.
Brandon Wint appeared on the Ottawa Spoken Word scene in late 2008 and was the Capital Slam Rookie of the Year in 2009 on his way to securing a position on the CapSlam team that would be crowned the National Slam Champions at CFSW that year. He repeated that honour the next year to make Brandon one of the few poets to be on TWO National Championship teams!
As a member of The Recipe, Brandon became one of the most recognizable spoken word poets in the country – something which escalated even more with the release of the Partus Films Video – Poetry in Motion. (Watch here )
In addition to a top feature, we have another round of Capital Slam!
Synonymous made his CapSlam season debut with a victory last time out and Loh El’s second place finish put him back at the top of the rankings. (See rankings here )
Loh El may be on top, but Sean O’Gorman won’t give it up so easily! And what about rookie Colleen Leafloor and CFSW Finals vets Just Jamaal and ArRay-of-WoRds who are breathing down his neck?
Come out to the Mercury Lounge to see it go down or to step up yourself!
Doors and sign-up are at 6:30pm. All ages welcome. $8 admission, or free for performers.